The present invention relates to the art of electronic commerce (i.e., e-commerce). The present invention finds particular application in conjunction with the addition of payment widgets to merchant checkout webpages, and it will be described with particular reference thereto. It is to be appreciated, however, that the invention is also amenable to other like applications.
E-commerce relates to the buying and selling of products and/or services between consumers and merchants over a communications network, such as the Internet. The convenience and availability of shopping over the Internet has sparked considerable interest in e-commerce on behalf of both consumers and merchants.
During a typical e-commerce transaction, a consumer browses a virtual directory of products and/or services offered by a merchant over a communications network to identify desired products and/or services. Upon identifying a desired product and/or service, the consumer adds the product and/or service to a virtual shopping cart. Once the consumer has added all the desired products and/or services to the virtual shopping cart, the consumer proceeds to a checkout webpage of the virtual shopping cart.
The checkout webpage allows the consumer to pay the merchant for the products and/or services added to the virtual shopping card. Typically, payment is facilitated by a payment widget on the checkout webpage. A payment widget includes a set of graphical user interface (GUI) elements that allow the user to enter payment data needed to complete the transaction and a payment routine to process the payment data to complete the transaction. Typical GUI elements include, for example, text boxes, buttons, dialog boxes, pop-up windows, pull-down menus, icons, scroll bars, resizable window edges, progress indicators, selection boxes, windows, tear-off menus, menu bars, toggle switches and forms.
To load the payment widget, the checkout webpage typically includes one or more bootstrap routines, typically JavaScript code, executed when the consumer accesses the checkout webpage. The bootstrap routines initialize the payment widget and add the payment widget to the checkout webpage. One challenge with such an arrangement is that merchants often employ a distributed computing environment. Hence, bootstrap routines for the payment widget can be distributed, thereby providing slower load time and increasing errors.
Another challenge is that merchants often employ off-the shelf or third party hosted shopping carts. While merchants are typically able to update the presentation layer of the checkout webpages (i.e., update the visual appearance of the checkout webpages), merchants may not be able to update the business logic of the checkout webpages. Hence, JavaScript or Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) header options, for example, needed by the payment widgets may be unavailable.
The present application provides a new and improved system and method which overcome these problems and others.